The report titled “progress towards the Lisbon objectives in education and training”, among others, assesses one of Lisbon’s goals to provide ICT access to everyone and to encourage a wider use of ICT in schools.

The aim is to increase digital literacy among the younger generation and the EC report shows there is still a lot to do. The European Commission regrets the lack of data available on how well is ICT integrated into the curriculum as well as on the learning outcomes of ICT usage in schools.

Data presented points out the discrepancies among member states concerning, for instance, the ratio of computers per pupils. While in countries such as Denmark, Luxembourg and Scotland there are seven pupils per computers, in Slovakia, Poland or Latvia, schools are under-equipped. The Commission fears in these countries pupils have no access to a computer whether at schools or at home.

Last year, a report presented by former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok showed that too many of the initial Lisbon targets will be missed at the current economic pace. The working document presented this month does not draw a better picture.

More efforts are required to tackle early school leaving, a danger if the EU wishes to built a competitive ‘knowledge-base economy’ mentions the report. The document also points out the need to promote the teaching of foreign languages as a crucial way to promote mobility and exchanges in an enlarged Europe.

Also, the EU needs to train more than one million teachers to replace the high proportion of teachers who will retire between 2005 and 2015.

A more positive note comes from the training of scientists. At the current pace the Lisbon objectives of increasing by 15 per cent the number of science graduate as well as reaching a men/women parity should be met, said the report.

Eventually the report criticise the lack of common benchmarks and indicators to measure progress towards the Lisbon objectives among member states.

Link:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/policies/2010/doc/progressreport05.pdf
 
High Level Group report for the European Commission (Nov. 2004)
http://europa.eu.int/growthandjobs/pdf/kok_report_en.pdf